Thread: The internet is giving you Aspergers

Breaking news: new technology changes us.

Gingers have souls.

Originally Posted by Marvo

Breaking news: new technology changes us.

Pretty much every headline of the 20th and 21st century. They have a whole section in my local book store about how technology rewires our brains, how we're losing our attention span and solving it by drugging our society with Adderall and Ritalin. Quite honestly, with the amount of doomsday predictions which occur literally everyday, the human race should have died out 50 years ago. You can drive yourself insane with constant fear from media sources if you wanted to.

You can drive yourself insane with constant fear from media sources if you wanted to.

No, that's what they want us to do, lol.

The article isn't particularly doomy or fearful. Being on HBR, it's more about how HR people are responding to the trend and how you can compensate in interviews.

Depends on the quality of the specific analysis, obviously it is eminently plausible here that the causality could go the other way round.

Why you little *strangles Taosaur over his "ginger" comment*

That is all....

Originally Posted by Xei

Depends on the quality of the specific analysis, obviously it is eminently plausible here that the causality could go the other way round.

Will it be enough to counteract, though?

If you keep stretching your mouth to make faces at people, it will stay like that.

Originally Posted by ShadowOfSelf

Gingers have souls.

Redhead's have souls. Gingers do not.

long-term exposure to electronic environments is reconfiguring young people's neural networks and possibly diminishing their ability to develop empathy, interpersonal relations, and nonverbal communication skills.

Only if you constantly troll, if you are serious and act like you usually would, or even more open, like in the case of most people here, it probably improves ALL of those things. (especially nonverbal communication skills.)

I spend most of my time in front of the computer; I can pick up on non-verbal cues just fine, it's my verbal skills that are severely lacking.

Me too Gavin. But I didn't always have the internet either. I assume most people here got it around 8-10 years old or so?
Plus someone mentioned a while ago about aloof/non-communicative parents basically forcing kids to pick up on non verbal cues so they can know what they're thinking etc.
So I think that helped a bit.

I know the internet and other personal technology is going to change us a lot. It's certainly led to people having shorter attention spans already.
And this does make sense. I mean, if you're communicating primarily through text, you will not learn to pick up on body language. Or at least not well.
I've also noticed myself becoming more expressive through text, like it's a primary language, at times. For example I'll say "Ummmm....." or write a post and be like "oh... wait I forgot about ____ nevermind" and then post it anyway. When there's really no point in either of those things. If I was still using it as a secondary sort of language, I would not put in "ummms" etc. because they add nothing, but it's like I'm communicating in real time in a way.

Originally Posted by ShadowOfSelf

Gingers have souls.

Prove it.

Also, I think computers are evil. I hate them, because I can actually SEE my attention span slipping away as I grow up. We're all fucked, losing our literacy.

Also, there is too much stuff on the internet. About 99% too much.